Behind Financial Forensics Labs

I spent fifteen years inside the structures that precede institutional collapse — before I built a framework to systematize what I was seeing.

Six years at FTI Consulting, in economic and financial consulting: learning to read a balance sheet before learning to distrust one, across asset allocation and advisory mandates with individuals and business owners in Argentina.

Five years at Kroll, as a Senior Analyst in Financial Due Diligence & Compliance: counterparty diligence, regulatory compliance reviews, and cross-border transaction analysis across LatAm, the US, and Europe.

Reading the documents that later became red flags — offering circulars, audit reports, GP/LP structures, sovereign credit packages. This is where the case library, the mechanism taxonomy, and the analytical methodology behind FFL were built — not as a theoretical exercise, but as the output of five years spent inside the structures before they broke.

Then Manou Estates, supporting capital advisory and investor relations for a US-based real estate platform — direct exposure to how institutional capital evaluates operators before committing.

I hold a Master in Finance from Universidad Di Tella (CFA-aligned) and an MBA from Universidad Austral.

Financial Forensics Labs exists because, in years of due diligence, I kept seeing the same signals appear again and again — pressure, opportunity, rationalization, capability, arrogance, collusion — and there was no tool that systematized them for rapid screening. All forensic research lived in people’s heads, loose PDFs, and private folders. Never in an engine you could run against a deal in cold, before signing.

Current base: Traslasierra, Córdoba, Argentina. Remote research, cross-border by design — not by necessity.

Financial Forensics Labs is an independent research and analysis practice. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any firm mentioned above.

— Sergio Stieben, Founder